


Breaking Point

by hannasus



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hate Sex, Mildly Dubious Consent, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, pre-5x01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-11
Updated: 2016-10-11
Packaged: 2018-08-21 23:33:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8264525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hannasus/pseuds/hannasus
Summary: In the aftermath of Havenrock, Felicity uses Oliver to deal with her pain, and he lets her.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Set prior to 5x01. I didn't actually intend for anything that happens in this story to constitute dubious consent, but I acknowledge that some people may interpret it differently, so I've tagged for it just in case. Trigger warning for references to Felicity's relationship with Detective Malone.

There are some days, like today, when Felicity can’t even stand to look at Oliver.

It’s his face that’s the problem. His stupid, gorgeous, perfect face. More specifically, it’s what she sees in his face when he looks at her: love, kindness, understanding.

She doesn’t deserve those things, and she doesn’t want them. Not from him. Not from anyone.

Fortunately for her, almost everyone who loves her is either gone or too busy to pay her any attention. Her mother’s off practicing to be Mrs. Quentin Lance. Diggle’s off being a soldier. Lyla’s mired in her own grief and anger. Thea has buried her head in the sand of City Hall business. Sara and Roy are god knows where. Laurel’s dead.

Everyone has left her except Oliver, who has the nerve to be down here in the bunker with her almost every night. Looking at her. With his face. Like he loves her, still. Like she’s worthy of any kind of love. How dare he?

She’s already having a bad day when he shows up tonight. There’s no particular reason, other than the same reason that haunts her every breath. It’s just that some days are worse than others, and today is one of the worse ones.

Her nerves are shot, her patience worn to a fraying thread, her heart beating too fast and too hard in her chest. She feels like she’s coiled too tight, ready to snap at any second. She’s all potential energy, in a constant state of suppressed combustion. It’s not a matter of _if_ she’ll explode, but _when_. How long she can hold it back before a stray spark blows everything to pieces.

And then Oliver walks into the lair and smiles at her with eyes that are soft and fond, like he’s happy to see her. How dare he?

It makes her burn with resentment, makes the bitterness rise up in her throat until she has to spit it out like venom.

“Nice work at the press conference today,” she says lieu of hello. “Why settle for just angering the police union when you can make an enemy out of the teacher’s union, too?”

She gets far too much satisfaction from watching the smile slide off his face. See? She doesn’t deserve his kindness. The sooner he realizes that, the better.

“I assume that was on purpose?” she says, digging in a little deeper. “Insulting schoolteachers?”

She knows if she can antagonize him enough, she can wipe all that kindness and sympathy right off his face. She can get him to stop looking at her with love shining out of his eyes, and look at her instead with the anger and resentment she deserves. She can provoke him to lash out at her, or at least retreat into one of his stony silences, so she doesn’t have to deal with him.

“No,” Oliver says slowly. “It wasn’t on purpose.”

The hurt on his face makes her feel sick to her stomach, but she can’t stop yet. She has to keep going until she’s transformed the hurt into anger, because his anger is what she needs.

“I mean, what else could you have been trying to do by making a crack about them getting summers off? Is that your idea of winning them over?”

His jaw clenches. “It was a mistake. I wasn’t thinking.”

“Right. Not thinking, that’s your specialty, I guess.”

It’s not that she wants to hurt him, it’s just that the space where her heart used to be is filled by a smoldering ember of self-loathing. She can’t help herself anymore. She can’t help anyone anymore.

He turns his back on her and reaches for his bow. “I’m going to get changed,” he says tightly.

Coward. He claims to mete out justice, but where is his sense of justice for all the lives she cut short at Havenrock? Where is the justice that _she_ deserves? Why won’t he punish her the way she deserves to be punished?

Felicity clenches her fists at her sides and fires one last volley: “Hey, maybe when you’re out on the streets tonight you could find a way to offend a few more people who work hard to keep this city running. Firefighters, maybe, or waste collectors.”

Oliver freezes, the muscles in his back taut with barely-contained fury.

This is it. He’s going to explode. Maybe he’ll even get angry enough to storm out, and then she won’t have to look at him for the rest of the night.

He turns around slowly, but instead of the rage she was expecting to see in his expression there’s something far, far worse: pity.

“I know what you’re doing,” he says quietly. “And it’s not going to work.”

“What?” she shoots back at him. “What am I doing?”

“You’re trying to push me away. But I won’t let you.”

“Pretty sure I already succeeded in pushing you away when I broke up with you.”

He winces at that, but he doesn’t retreat.

“Why do you even keep coming back here?” she snarls. “It’s not like you’re actually making a difference out there—and don’t say it’s because the city needs you. The city needs you to be a better mayor, but I don’t see you putting much effort into _that_.” Lashing out at him is the only defense she has, and she can’t stop herself now, not even if she wanted to.

He takes a halting step toward her. “I’m here because _you_ need me.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. I’m doing just fine.”

“No,” he says, shaking his head slowly. “You’re not. You think I can’t see that you’re in pain right now? You think you can hide something like that from me? I’ve been where you are, Felicity. I know what you’re going through, and I’m not going to let you go through it alone.”

“I don’t want your help.”

“I know that right now it hurts so much you can barely stand to be inside your own skin. And I know it seems like that feeling is never going to go away. But it does, I promise you. It gets easier. You learn how live with it.”

She feels her lip tremble and struggles to maintain her control. “Maybe I don’t want to live with it.”

His faces twists, anguished, and he takes another step toward her. “Felicity—”

“ _Stop!”_ she shouts, throwing up her hands to ward him off. “Just stop! Stop talking to me, stop feeling sorry for me, and stop trying to save me!”

“Never.”

His eyes are so clear and deep and blue she can almost imagine falling into them. She can almost let herself believe that that he can pick up her broken pieces and put them together again.

But even if that were possible, she can’t allow it to happen. She doesn’t deserve to be healed. She doesn’t deserve any kind of peace or happiness, not when she’s stripped it away from tens of thousands of innocent souls.

That’s why she can’t let him go on loving her. Why she needs to root his devotion out at the source and obliterate every last vestige of the tenderness that once lay between them.  

And there is only one other way she can think of to do that. To corrupt the love he has for her and twist it into something ugly and painful. To make him look at her with the same revulsion she feels when she looks at herself in the mirror. And it’s the one thing she knows he won’t be able to resist.

Felicity takes a long, shaky breath, gathers herself together, and steps into him, fitting herself into his arms like she never left.

She feels him hesitate, sucking in a shaky breath, before wrapping his arms around her.

There was a time, not so long ago, when she would have been able to find comfort in his embrace. Now it brings her nothing but pain. But pain is what she deserves, and she revels in it, letting it soak into her skin and pool in the pit of her stomach, burning its way up her esophagus.

If he won’t offer it willingly, she will take her punishment however she can get it.

She will burn it all down, not by choice, but because it is in her nature. Because she is poison, and she kills everything she touches. Even him. Especially him. He should have left when he had the chance.

He flinches when she kisses him, but she only kisses him harder, until she feels his muscles sag and his mouth go soft against hers, opening for her. Letting her in.

He ought to know better, but he’s defenseless against her, as helpless to resist his nature as she is. She can feel his need pressing against her, can feel his desperation in the way his fingertips curl into her skin.

“Felicity,” he gasps against her mouth.

She cups his erection, and her name dies on his lips in a strangled groan. When her fingers move to the button on his jeans, he shudders, but he doesn’t pull away.

Felicity drops to her knees before him.

“Wait.” His fingers tangle in her ponytail, tilting her head back. “You don’t really want this.”

“You do.” She unzips his pants and yanks them down his thighs.

“Not like this.” His voice is scraped raw, barely more than a whisper.

She gazes up at him, defiant and unblinking. “Then stop me.”

He can’t. He won’t. They both know it.

She takes him in her hand says the words that she knows will bind him to her, inexorably: “I need you, Oliver.”

It’s not a lie. But it’s not the truth in the way he wants it to be.

She feels him tremble and knows she’s won, but it’s a hollow victory. Winning, in this case, is the same as losing. For both of them.

She will destroy whatever happiness they might once have found in each other. She will use his love for her against him, corrupt it and turn it to hate. She will obliterate every trace of the man who loved her.

It’s not that she wants to hurt him, it’s just that his love is more than she can endure.

He comes hard and quickly, sighing her name like he always used to when they were happy, and shame burns behind her eyes as he fills her throat with his seed.

She pushes herself off of him, spits on the floor at his feet, and stands, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. When he reaches for her she backs away, shaking her head.

“Nothing’s changed between us,” she says coldly. “This doesn’t mean anything.”

He looks away. And then he nods, shoulders slumped in resignation, like he already knew she would say that. “Whatever you want.”

“I don’t love you anymore.”

He looks up at her, pants still around his knees, and holds her eyes with his. “Okay.”

She stares into the fathomless depths until she can’t stand it anymore, then turns away from him and snatches up her purse. She needs to get out of here. She needs to wash his touch off her skin, and scrub the taste of him out of her mouth.

“Felicity,” he says when she reaches the top of the stairs. She pauses, one hand on the door, but doesn’t turn around. “I’m still not going anywhere.”

She slams out of the lair and runs to her car. Drives the whole way home with tears falling silently down her face.

* * *

The next night, Oliver’s already there, waiting for her, when she walks into the lair.

She would have stayed away, but she doesn’t have anywhere else to go. What’s his excuse?

He greets her like everything’s normal, like last night never happened. But she knows him too well to be fooled by his false pleasantries. It doesn’t escape her notice the way he braces himself whenever she looks at him, like a dog expecting to be kicked.

She plays along with the charade for the time being, pretending that everything’s normal between them. Looks Oliver in the eye like she didn’t debase them both last night. Like she’s not dead inside. Like she doesn’t hate herself with every fiber of her being.

She’s good at pretending, she always has been. She paints her lips and her nails in bold, cheerful colors to match the dresses she still wears every day, even though she no longer has anywhere to go but a lonely basement. She puts on high heels to feel taller and jewelry to feel prettier, even though she is small and ugly on the inside. She bleaches her roots and her teeth so that her smile remains as bright as her hair, even though there’s nothing left to smile about.

They’re both here to work, so that’s what they do. There’s a report of gang activity at a park downtown, and after the Green Arrow finishes breaking up a turf war in the making, she directs him to a robbery in progress at a nearby restaurant.

When Oliver comes back to the lair hours later, sweaty and bruised and exhausted, Felicity meets him at the door.

He twitches when she touches him, but he doesn’t move away. She wraps her arms around his neck and kisses him, and he stands there and lets her, not pulling her closer, but not pushing her away, either. Mercilessly, she presses her lips against his ear and whispers the magic words: “I need you.”

He ends up fucking her against the wall with his Arrow mask still on.

If she can’t push him away, then she will take him down with her.

* * *

It becomes a nightly ritual for them.  

He always waits for her to make the first move. Always lets her set the pace, lets her show him what she wants from him. He never asks for anything, never tries to takes any pleasure for himself. It becomes a sort of game for her, a challenge to see how quickly she can get him off. One of them might as well get some gratification out of this calamity.

As soon as she’s done with him, she readjusts her clothes and walks out, leaving him alone with the stench of sex-soaked latex and regret.

She knows Oliver can’t possibly be okay with this new arrangement, but he never says a word about it. Never complains. She keeps waiting for him to reach the breaking point. To tell her that he can’t do it anymore, that’s he’s done. But he never does. He keeps coming back, like a drug addict. Keeps letting her do whatever she wants, no matter how much it must be hurting him.

“Why do you let me do it?” she finally asks him a few weeks later, as she’s pulling up her underwear. She’s getting tired of waiting for him to put a stop to this. She wants it to be over.

He looks at her with sad, reproachful eyes, like the answer should be obvious. “Because it’s what you want. I would do anything for you, Felicity.”

Stupid, stubborn, self-sacrificing asshole. She should have known she couldn’t beat him at the masochism game.

* * *

It’s a few days after that that Felicity meets Detective Malone while she’s fishing for information on a spate of recent robberies. It’s obvious he’s attracted to her, so she offers to buy him a drink after his shift. He takes her up on it, and she invites him back to her place.

Funnily, she doesn’t feel anything at all when he fucks her in the bed that used to be hers and Oliver’s.

Malone turns out to be a rich source of insider SCPD information, so Felicity keeps seeing him, and she makes sure Oliver knows about it.

She’s hoping for jealousy, anger, indignation, or even just annoyance, but Oliver doesn’t give her any such satisfaction. He simply bows his head, says, “Okay,” and goes on about his day like it doesn’t matter.

The next time she kisses him, she expects him to recoil, but he doesn’t even blink. He takes her on the med table and sighs her name when he comes, just like he always does, like it’s their first time all over again.

Felicity wonders if she can go on like this forever. Sleeping with two men, living every day in an icy vacuum of unfeeling. She doesn’t have an endgame anymore. Can’t see her way through the fog of disgust to any sort of next step. She’s numb through and through, operating on autopilot.

And then one night, she almost gets Oliver killed.

She sends him to what she thinks is a small-time stash house, but turns out to be a heavily guarded distribution center. Neither of them are prepared for the amount of firepower waiting for him inside. He’s outnumbered and outgunned, trapped in a kill box with limited exit routes.

“You need to fall back,” she shouts over the hail of automatic gunfire. “Get out of there, now!”

“Trying,” he grunts under his breath. There’s more gunfire, followed by the sounds of hand-to-hand fighting, and then the crash of breaking glass. She hears Oliver cry out in pain, and then … silence.

“Oliver!” she cries out, radio discipline forgotten. “Oliver are you okay?”

Nothing.

For two full minutes, she’s absolutely convinced he’s dead. There’s no backup to send to his aid anymore, and SCPD are still ten minutes away. All she can do is monitor the police channels and wait to hear the worst.

She’s right on the edge of getting into her car and driving over there herself, when she hears him murmur her name.

“Oliver? Are you safe?” Her hands are shaking, and she has to grip the edge of the desk to keep them still.

“For now,” he whispers. “I’m holed up in a garage on the other side of the block. Their enforcers are still looking for me, though, and I’m pinned down.”

She checks her monitors. “SCPD are still five minutes away.”

“I can wait it out. They’ll give up the search as soon as they see the police lights.”

“Are you hurt?”

“I can wait it out,” he repeats stubbornly.

“How bad is it?”

“Not bad. Cut myself going through the window, is all.”

She knows he’d never tell her the truth if it was really bad. He could be lying there quietly bleeding to death and never let on that he was dying. And she’s the one who’d have to live with it the rest of her life.

Felicity stands up, already digging in her purse for her keys. “I’m coming to get you.”

“No!” he hisses. “I’m okay. I can make it back on my own.”

“Do you swear? Swear to me, Oliver.” Fear makes her voice tremble and she even doesn’t care at this point if he can hear it.

“I swear,” he says, solemn and earnest.

He makes it back to the lair a half hour later, with his leathers soaked in blood and a jagged piece of glass lodged in his right arm and another in his side. He can barely even use the arm, and Felicity doesn’t have any idea how he managed to ride the bike like that.

She guides him over to the med table and helps him strip to the waist. As soon as she’s maneuvered his shirt off of him, he sags back wearily onto the table.

“How much blood have you lost?” She yanks the overhead light down for a better look at his injuries. “Do you need a transfusion?”

He shakes his head, wincing as she prods at the wound in his side. “Not that much.”

She doesn’t like how weak he seems, or the heaviness of his eyes, so she grabs a bag of hypertonic fluid and starts an IV, just to be safe.

Neither of them speaks as she works to remove the glass, clean his wounds, and stitch him up. It’s the first time he’s been seriously injured since John left. The first time he’s needed her to take care of him.

The only sounds are Oliver’s hitching breaths and the pounding of Felicity’s pulse in her ears. She can feel the cracks forming in the dam holding back her emotions, and she bites down on her lip to keep the torrent at bay.

“Thanks,” he mutters as she’s bandaging up his arm.

She wheels the stool around to his other side, and places a square of gauze over the cut in his abdomen. “You’re lucky neither of these hit anything critical.”

He looks away. “I don’t feel very lucky.”

Her hand shakes as she put the last piece of tape in place. “You could be dead.”

“Nice to know you care.”

The tears she’s been holding back spill out of her eyes, and she turns away, trying to hide her face from him.

“Hey.” He catches her hand in his, his callouses rough against her skin. “Hey, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

She shakes her head, squeezing her eyes shut. “It’s my fault.”

“No, it’s not.”

Emotion rises up in the back of her throat, threatening to drown her. She can’t hold it in anymore. “Everything’s my fault. Everything I do is wrong.” She curls in on herself and cries, her whole body convulsing with each wracking gasp.

Oliver’s good arm slides around her shoulders, pulling her toward him, and she collapses onto his chest, clinging to him as she sobs. “I don’t know how to live with myself,” she whimpers through her tears. “Everything hurts all the time.”

His hand tangles in her ponytail, covering the back of her head. “I know,” he says. “I know.”

“I don’t want to be alone.” She presses into him, her arms tightening around his torso. “Help me.”

Gentle, reassuring fingers curl into her hair. “Always.”

She can feel his heartbeat against her cheek, steadfast and unwavering. Just like him. “I hate myself,” she confesses. “I don’t want to hurt you anymore.”

“Then don’t,” he says.

She takes a wracking breath and lifts her head to gaze at him through the tear-stained lenses of her glasses. “Please don’t leave me.”

He takes her hand and brings it to his lips. “Never.”

His eyes are soft and bottomless, shining with love for her, and for the first time in months, the sight doesn’t bring her pain. She wants to believe that he can pick up her broken pieces and put them together again. She wants to let him.

Felicity lowers her head to his chest so she can feel his heartbeat again, and allows herself to feel a flicker of hope.

“I love you,” she whispers, so quietly she’s not even sure he can hear her.

Oliver lets out a long, shaky breath, rubs his thumb over her knuckles, and whispers back, “I know.”


End file.
